


Cabinet

by Anonymous



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Ghosts, Goodsir-centric, M/M, Magical Elemens But It's Still Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:08:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22772302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: That is the first night he dreams of Graham Gore (not a Lieutenant anywhere, perhaps; the place he is now having no use for such names) or the first night when he meets him in his dreams, at least.It is not the last.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Harry D. S. Goodsir/Lady Silence | Silna, Harry D. S. Goodsir/Lt Graham Gore, hints of
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15
Collections: Anonymous





	Cabinet

**Author's Note:**

> Second Terror Bingo fill – which is, incidentally, also a fill for a super-old prompt featuring Goodsir/Gore + Kiss (for the anon who was kind enough to send it – many apologies for the delay. You probably don’t even remember it, it’s that ancient, but still – here it is.)  
> Warnings: Canon-compliant, so brace for the sadz. Also trigger warnings for violence, vaguely graphic gore, and suicide (duh).  
> Based on a semi-complete rewatch, so things should generally add up – but I did toy around a bit with Harry’s last conversation with Crozier in the tent in Hickey’s camp.  
> Terror Bingo Prompt: a moment of respite

The first time Harry Goodsir finds himself thinking of Lieutenant Gore's hands, and the strength in them, and the gentleness with which he took briefly hold of Harry's side to keep him from tumbling over, it doesn't come as a surprise.  I nstead, it comes kindly, softly, like waves lapping gently at his feet. It comes to him just before he falls into uneasy sleep, in the sheath of fur and knobby taper between him and the  ground , on the third night of their trip to the Point; and if it can do nothing for the ache and the cold (the cold, the cold, always the cold: keeping it from encroaching and filling every other thought a daily struggle), it reminds him of sunny days, at least; of being a thing alive, with a skin that can be touched.  The thought of the Lieutenant’s hands  comes silently and without asking anything in return, like Gore's care of him; like everything between them. 

  
  


He dreams of those hands: concoctions of his own mind, of how they must look like under the slops and the unsightly pincers of the mittens. Long fingers, and strong: the feeling of ridges and valleys of calluses against his, the palm large enough to wrap around Harry's, bleeding warmth into it. A smattering of hair on the knuckles; nice pearly nails; freckles, too, russet like copper dust. Those fingers, following the line of Harry's wrist, the pulse point thudding there, the curve of a shoulder. Cupping,  prodding,  parting gently. Drawing lines across the expanse of him. 

  
  


Harry wakes up gulping down gasps, biting on the  fabric of his sleeve : his body  is tingling with phantom touch ing , but he still manages not to make a sound. He knows what the se fantasies mean; he knows no one is to know of them. He remembers  the same  half-dreams from the miserable years of boarding school, the shudders going through him at the sight of a friend's delicate  wrists , or the strong lean line of  boys’  legs when they played football in the courtyard.  He remembers t he lovely confusion of later years, when he would admire the slant of the neck of Miss Delaware during his brother's excruciating attempt s at courtship, and the shapely lips of Miss Delaware's older brother, and feel no difference whatsoever in the loveliness of them. 

Harry remembers; and though innocent, he is not stupid, despite what Doctor Stanley and a good portion of the civilized world may think. He knows that is not the prescribed way of things, the natural way of them: finds he doesn't care enough to feel crushed with guilt, no matter how hard he tried to warp himself into it.

They're on the frozen edge of the world, on the edge of a nothingness of maps and men; and still there are crystal-clear nights of milk and blue fire,  landscapes  of a beauty so pure it fills your veins with starlight. No God who could pain t such splendor on the very corners of His paintings, some of it  n ever to be witnessed  but by bea s ts of the deep and  wanderers , would resent His creatures for loving too much, or too broadly. 

(No God,  Harry has decided,  looking at the sketch of marvelous Monarch butterfly in his diary, the rendition of a Michelangelo's well-shaped male head beside it,  no God  who made him so sensitive to the subtle marvel of the world and its inhabitants would con demn him for seeing it in men as well as in women. How can  devotion be wrong, after all, when nothing else is less likely to bring harm into existence?) 

  
  


Lieutenant Gore touched him twice more over the course of the next day:  momentarily dimming the straining misery of pulling the sleigh. The slight pressure on Harry's elbow, on his spine; a faint splaying of fingers  against it . They don't meet eyes afterwards; there is too much to do, bending and struggling and breathing, the laborious geometry of it. But Harry wonders if the glare of the sun – unforgiving; heatless – is making him fancy a  flush crawling up the Lieutenant's neck, in the strip between hats and comforters and meshed goggles  where  they're still allowed to look like human beings. 

He wonders, for the first time, how it would feel like to grow friends with this good, fair man; to be allowed to call him by his first name, as so few men have allowed Harry to in his life. He trie s it during the lunch break:  whispering under his breath, into  his mug. 

_ Graham _ . An articulated name, a name requiring attention – soft and softly English despite the abundance of hard consonants.  _ Graham.  _ He closes his eyes, breathes in the tight echo of it. He imagined it on the lips of a lover: a girl at home, sealing letters  sprayed  with rose water; painted lips in half a dozen ports,  maybe . How it would feel to be one of them – to press that name in to sweaty hair, against a skin slick with salt, in the crush of bodies. What taste would it leave on the lips – different from that name  when on the mouth of a friend, no doubt.  D arker, richer, like vintage wine. Heady, too. 

(Honeysuckle, he muses; remembering the mild cordial his mother makes from th ose  sturdy yellow buds, the peculiar spring  feeling it brings to mind. 

Graham, leaving honeysuckle on the lips of his lovers.) 

  
  


Lieutenant Gore – Graham – smiles a t Harry as he tells him he's good enough to be a doctor,  at least  to his  own eyes.  H e licks his lips  as he says it, the motion a bare flutter under the hem of the comforter.  The smile may be there, it may  be not; it's  snow blindness , a breath a bit deeper than the others.  M ade mostly of impressions and tricks of the light, this language of theirs. 

Still,  Harry is indeed a half-heartbeat too slow in wrenching his eyes off the Lieutenant's mouth, and  Graham Gore  indeed mirrors  the gesture , and lets his eyes fall to Harry's own lips: the gaze so steady it hits with a physical  _ thud _ . They stand like this, holding their breath, the golden line  of one’s gaze trained to the other's lips: suddenly aware of the heat of two bodies so close together in such desolation, of soft flesh under your thumbs. 

Harry's mind grows wobbly with lack of air: he sucks in a lungful, sways a bit on his feet, and Gore comes back to himself too – blinking slowly, as if rousing from a dream. The moment is gone, but  it existed : Harry clutches it to his chest, cuts it out of the world like a flower sampling, to p reserve pressed  between pages: forever, if he can manage it. 

(Sometimes, late at night, in the cold washed-out hours at the morgue during school, or at home, tapping at the butterflies pinned to the ir cardboard in the study – the sudden  certainty , when there is no polite society to witness it: that more than the gilded clou d s  painted on the ceilings of Papist European churches,  looking so much like the congealed meringue of coffee shop cakes, to him Heaven is a cabinet of one's life's curiosities, a tidiness of samples and memories most cherished.  And everyone is the curator of one's own museum, keeping dust from the prizes of one's existence, reminding oneself that  _ yes, I remember this; and I remember that  _ _ shell I picked up before leaving for India _ _ , and that flower my sister weaved through her hair when we were five, and the exact shape of his jaw as he leaned over me; and for all of this, I  _ _ know I  _ _ lived. _ )

  


They're moving again,  Gore and his men and Harry with them ; they come to the cairn, have to stumble and struggle their way to it, a penitence for every inch gained. Harry is shaking with exhaustion, trying not to cry in front of all these sturdy, brave men who pulled a sleigh across  miles of nothing and are  currently  trying to warm back into ink the black clump in the inkwell. 

The cairn stands before them, silent. No, not silent at all.  A deep, troubling hum puls es from  Harry’s legs all the way to the center of his chest, zapping up his nerves. He has the upsetting impression that the hum is coming from the cairn, newly awaken by their shuffling and their scribbling; that it is the heart of the land itself he's hearing, thru m ming up his body, and that if it has a heartbeat then it's not land at all, but a creature, and that almost every creature in existence has a mouth, too – gaping wide and hungry  under their feet. He wants to grab at Lieutenant Gore, who's  sl ipping the tin cylinders inside the tower of pebbles;  he wants to hold him and keep him safe ly back , keep his name away from the sprawling beast waiting underground.  He wants to shake his head, and rest, and stop seeing things that aren't there. 

Lieutenant Gore doesn't seem to be feeling the thud, the heartbeat still pulsing  through Harry's body; he seems cheered up by the task, and as he splits the men and starts off again he throws a flicker of a smile at Harry from over his shoulder. 

E ven if he isn't sure it was meant for him (he's used to glances and smiles sliding off him, over him; to a  life whe re he has to work harder than  many  others to be fully visible), he can't help shoot  a smile back, los t for  a second in the pleasure of it.

He  doesn’t tell the Lieutenant any thing of his impressions ; he forgets to warn him that – that what? There is nothing wrong, here: nothing but the grim un ease of these latitudes,  tidily measured, fully expected. 

Lieutenant Gore is receding into the distance, a whiter speckle against the sky. Harry realizes he's not sure he's ever seen him out of the slops long enough to know the exact color of his hair.

The hum is receding, too: growing into white noise in the back of his head, almost easy to ignore. Still, the cairn is there, casting shadows, blotting out the light: the long black tongue of it brushing at the tip of his boots.

The men are leaving, in both directions, slowly and steadily. He's alone. He's been left behind. 

(Harry Goodsir's God painted the Arctic in the greens and pinks and blues of the Aurora; made  both  men and women so lovely and wondrous.  H e wouldn't push his sons into this white death,  into the fangs of a gaping hole of a mouth: not sons so worthy and good, spreading the limits of their world, mapping the shapes and lines of His creativity. He wouldn't, right? 

Right?) 

  
  


They  all hear  it ,  crouching together in  the same tent: the grumbling and gnashing.  With it, the image of the broken  boat they found earlier this afternoon , their packing scattered out of it like innards  of a gutted prey; the kind of creature that could gnash its teeth and growl and tear  through  all those inches of solid wood. 

Harry  wasn’t thinking about the boat, or the creature; he was seeing Lieutenant Gore again, his lips parting at the sight of Harry’s own lips. He wanted to fix it in his mind, to put it to paper, later; to properly prepare this sample of life for his own private cabinet.  Graham’s hands, his name; his l ips . The presence of his own lips – chapped, thin as his mother's; perpetually stabbed with the imprints of teeth, marks of all he keeps himself from saying out loud – somewhere in Lieutenant Gore's mind. He wanted to think about it, the small miracle of it: of the conversations they can still have, will have, of how sure he feels the Lieutenant w ill hear his concerns about the cairn and consider his words carefully: consider  _ him _ carefully, the half-visible man. They will have time to do it later, on the way back: the talk, and eyes falling to map out each other's face, following mouths and noses and throats like stars in a constellation, and then – more; things Harry has known only in fumbling caresses in the dark of a boys' dormitory.  He knows there can be better things to it; sweeter things  than that fumbling of bodies, of lips. They will have time for it. If nothing else, he will have time to dream of it – which is a delight in its own right, if a paler one. 

But – Harry is not to do any of those things: for there is the gnashing and crashing, now,  and the hail  coming down from the sky,  and the madness of wool-covered men running around, half-mad with fear before they even close their shaking hands around the rifle.  Harry hears the shots, the flare  of them , the senseless pain coming out of the barrel alongside  with  the bullet. A premonition, then: the humming of  the land’s  secret heart coming back, multiplied. 

_ This is how we lose our innocence,  _ _ Harry _ finds himself thinking, without wanting  any of those words in his head.  _ This is how we lose.  _

Harry staggers under the though: can feel his own pulse thunder, wash away all his carefully arranged cabinet of thoughts of a modern nineteenth-century man of science. His bones feel liquid, too bright, phosphorous with fear; Lieutenant Gore's well-shaped face lost in terror. 

_The Lieutenant – Graham._

_Where is he? Where?_

The hum grows louder, louder. It changes into a growl. The growl has a crunching of teeth in it, the wet musty sound of fresh crushed, and then there is a scream weaved into it. It's a yelp, nothing more – a rabbit, dying under Harry's brothers’ rifles. Somehow, it makes it worse. 

Harry scrambles  towards it, peers over the ridge .  In the dark,  In the storm, the blackness of these nights, he sees the  white splash of  _ something _ – the enormous creature breathing underground;  a thing God, the same God of shapely ankles and delicate moth wings, made.  Harry sees it, and sees it with its jaws around Graham, and watches it as it  skewer ed Graham  Gore  in a blob of arterial blood. 

The spray is black ink; the head lolls to the side, and it's not Gore anymore, nothing like him. 

Harry feels the tear inside his chest – a fist closing under his breastbone. The compressed sunbeam of smiles, the honeysuckle: all lost, all lost. 

He screams. He's still screaming as the white thing vanishes, in the crevices of this land; he's still screaming when the rest of the men find him. He only stops when he sees the dark man gasping in wheezy breaths between them, the mess of blood and bubbling meat in his chest; the girl weeping in another language at his side. 

(Far, far away, the cool summer of Scotland – the buttery summer of his childhood – has just lost a bit of its sunlight, and it will never be quite as warm as when Graham Gore walked this Earth.) 

  


  


  


They come back to the ships in a blur;  it take s years, decades,  minutes . To Harry it feels like both at the same time: an instant, yes, but the instant you spend underwater  after you ran out of air – uncomfortably eternal. He  also feels that he never really stops  moving as they fly over over the ice. (Driving themselves into the ground by trying to go too fast, scrambling, dragged down by the bodies piled over the canned meat and oilcloth-wrapped scientific instruments; hearts racing as if  still chased , the  kin of the  rabbit dangling from the white beast's jaws.) 

It is true,  after a fashion: the old man's wound bleeding him  dry ,  rupturing again as soon as  Harry manages to stopper one  tear : his hands never really stopping working, only slowing down,  tide-like .

The eyes of the girl – the woman: an impression of high proud cheekbones when she flicked back her fur hood, a hardness not even Harry has probably come to before his thirtieth birthday – never leav e him; the picture imprinted on the inside of his eyelids,  of  Gore's mouth brimming with black blood,  never far behind ; neither of th ose things making it wise to attempt to sleep. But at least the man is something to focus on; someone still in the realm of the living. Someone he can still reach, still help, as he still  belongs to the realm of Harry's gentle God. 

(He had to help arrange the corpse on the boat; has to fix dangling tendrils of skin, tidy up death for the eyes of their commanders. He touched the dead gray skin of what was Graham Gore, tied up the hole across him, stinking of loose bowels, and did it tenderly, precise as always, and then quietly went to throw up bile a hundred feet from the boat. He didn't care if the men saw. He didn't care at all.)

He nearly cries at the sight of the ships; he nearly cries at the throng of officers streaming out of them at their approach, as if the _Terror_ and the _Erebus_ were hemorrhaging blue coats. It is relief, overwhelming and animal, at the reality of live human beings; it is a spike of rage so pure it leaves him dizzy.

Look at them: so tall and bright-eyed, so pink under their comforters – tired, yes, as they all are, but still flushing with healthy blood at the cold, their hearts still pumping warmth and not going to give up anytime soon. As he looks on at Sir John panting his way to them, the Eskimo man's chest humming under his hands like a trapped bird, this is all Harry can think: _they are here,_ _as_ _you are, and Graham Gore is not._

When Captain Crozier sidles up to him, grim-faced and soaked with whisky but oh-so-solid, Harry has to take no less than five deep breaths to make sense of his words. His heart is pulsing in the bones of his skull. He feels his muscles coil up with tension. Because he hates this man, because he wants to sink in his arms and sob himself to sleep – he's not sure. 

The  Eskimo  man, coughing up syrupy blood – t he girl's eyes  drilling holes into the back of his head. Yes, yes: he almost forgot, almost forgot he has a mission after all. He goes through the motions of care, and then of explaining that care: automatically,  like a clock , driven  through ticks  by familiar gravity. The gravity takes him up the gangplank, and down into the smoky innards of the ship, and to the comfort of the sickbay, with its sharp smells and tidy steel tools. 

He doesn't feel numb, not exactly: more like he's tipped over some previously unseen edge, a membrane, and the change made him both more aware and less vulnerable than he has ever been.  He thinks,  in the same breath , of the rituals of passages he's read about in the works of  archaeologists , of crabs shedding a skin for another when it grows too small. 

When Doctor Stanley  barks at him with the usual pointless  bite , Harry's shoulders bunch up – waiting for the impact, the pain of inadequacy: feels nothing of the sort. He's past it, he realizes.  H e has touched Graham Gore's hand. He has dreamed of his name. He has seen him turned into a bloodied doll, a dead rabbit.  Wherever he is now, h e is not sure anyone's words can reach him. 

Certainly Doctor Stanley's can’t. 

  
  


Harry doesn't even realize he's falling asleep. He knows only he has spoken with the captains (not talking of Lieutenant Gore's kind words, or of the ominous humming pulsing out of the cairn, or of how long he screamed after watching that thing tear him apart, long enough  to leave his throat raw after days ; none of it changing anything, all of it excised by his modesty); that he has done all he could to save the old man; that he has done his duty. 

Now – now he's lying on his cot: slick with old sweat and cramped, but  _ his _ , and he is alone, and  trembles as the flush of gratitude that  fills him with. 

Harry doesn't expect to dream, with such tire dn ess on his shoulders.  H e does. He dreams of blood  sprays  against the snow – instantly smudged, a hazy darkness that could be pig blood in the back of a butcher's shop, dirty slush lining a city street. He dreams of the  Eskimo girl's intelligent eyes, piercing ly hungry, but not cruel, no, never:  _ seeing _ him more than perhaps even Graham Gore ever did. 

His brother's laugh; his mother's hands pressing on the cracked keys of the family cottage piano; both spoiled horribly by sudden rivulets of black bile covering the rosewood case, the laugh turning into the gurgling of the old man's lungs near the end. 

Then, suddenly, the dream, and Harry's  vision in side it, clears:  growing crystal-like in its crispness. It doesn't  even feel like a dream a nymore ; moreover, he is not home, but in one of the tents they took on their wretched trip to the cairn, sitting on the hard lumpy cot, shivering and sweating under all his layers.  W hy should he dream of this, with all the worlds and all the times to pick from? 

But there is a reason to be here: and it is Lieutenant Gore, sitting beside him on the cot, looking golden and smiling and  _ alive _ i n the light of the hurricane lamp resting on the floor by their feet. They're alone; the wind howls mournful songs, but muffled by the tarp, it sounds almost soothing. Harry feels his heart thud against his teeth at the sight; closes the distance between them, cupping Lieutenant Gore's cheek with one hand, bold with the boldness of fantasies. The skin under his fingers is warm; he recognizes the smell of him, of soap and fresh perspiration. He has never done anything like this, not in his world, and yet the sensation of their bodies fitting snugly  into each other’s rings through Harry's chest. A church bell's peal. 

"You're alive," he says, dumbly. He sees something dark flicker across Gore's face, much like pain. "You're here," he amends; and at this Gore –  _ Graham _ ; the name pulsing out of Harry, screaming to be acknowledged – smiles again his wide lovely smile. He says nothing, though;  not even when he shifts under Harry's touch, and sli ps an arm around his waist, taking advantage of the closeness, and tugs him forward – nose against his throat, the  heat pooling at the pulse point. 

Harry trembles through his next breath, tilts his chin up, eyes closed against the light of the lamp. Butterfly wings, beating against his neck. Well-shaped lips. 

Harry wakes up in a tangle of sheets, shivering, boneless. There are feet shuffling outside of his door; an inner clock telling him he's expected to crawl out of here and join the shuffling feet in a handful of minutes.

He's never felt so tired in his life – and yet. 

Yet, as he leans over to grope for his jacket, he thinks the air smells, faintly, of honeysuckle. 

  
  


That is the first night he dreams of Graham Gore (not a Lieutenant anywhere, perhaps; the place he is now having no use for such names) or the first night when he meets him in his dreams, at least. 

It is not the last. 

  
  


Sir John is unexpected. Sir John is a shiver of fever when you thought you pulled through the malady, a hand yanking at your wrist in your bed once you think you're safe. Harry sees it all – no degree of horror too classified for him: a doctor's privilege.  He hums with it for hours afterwards, reeling as he tidies up the miserable remains in their coffin, as he shivers beside the rest of the men as they listen and stare at their new leaders – one tall and one stout, both  bruised-eyed,  and looking peculiarly like children in their dress uniform greatcoat s : like older brothers pretending to be in charge when one's parents are  not there . 

_ They are _ , he finds himself thinking.  _ We are.  _

That reeling surprises Harry. He thought that after Gore, after having messily buried the old man whose heart he felt pulsing under his fingertips for days, he changed: grown into a harder thing that couldn't be really touched by the world. He now realizes he was sorely wrong. He isn't sure if the knowledge comes as a comfort or not. 

These weeks have gifted him with the girl, at least. Silna: her name the first prized word of her language she let him have, after the interesting drudgery of the shades of 'fish' and 'seal' and 'sea'. She asks him, through their personal pidgin of fumbling gestures and purposeful spelling, not to share it with his companions, and he obeys. She stays Lady Silence for anyone else, the captains included. They chuckle together about it. 

Silna is clever, precise; she is cautious without being skittish, in the way he has never been able to be cautious with things or people. If he can fancy himself a Labrador dog, always running ahead of his common sense, she is a cat, wisely considering the dark before threading through it. She can be warm, though: and she keeps the dreams at bay, the dreams of blood and corruption. She makes him slightly less afraid of being soft. 

He comes dangerously close to tell her: the words already half-coalesced on his tongue, pushing against his teeth to be let out.  The day Sir John died; the hunting shed.  That moment, that awful moment before the creature came and they were left alone – _ orphaned _ – when Harry applied his eye to the daguerreotyp e , in the pungent smell of phosphor and oil and metal, and looked at the upside-down  image of the Marines and Sir John showing grainily on the screen –  and  found it suddenly repulsing, like a dismembered body. It seemed to him, then, that Harry's mind,  that some part of him was already running, clawing its way out of him, through his ribs, and scampering away, choosing the ice and the solitude over staying to see whatever was to happen next.  _ These are dead men. These men are all dead.  _

It felt like a revelation. It felt like a hum, the hum of a great dark heart. 

He thinks of telling Silna about it; of unburdening himself of the weight of it all, this sickness beneath his skin. If someone can believe him, it's her. If someone can endure this pressure, it's her – her broad shoulders, her clever hands. 

In the end, he doesn't. Silna has just lost her father, is trapped by strangers' distrust: she doesn't need more shadows to worry about. To be able to endure something is no reason enough to be saddled with more hurt than what is necessary. 

The hum is staying with him this time. It thrums in his teeth when he takes his meals, the China haphazardly perched on his knees; it bleeds into the pulse of the patients coming to him. It seeps into his sleep, too. 

Graham is there the night of the funeral – as he usually is, as fastidious in this strange half-death as he was in life. Still golden and warm, though looking vaguely more haggard, like he too lived through the last month of Harry's life. It feels almost like they are inhabiting the same space after all, and not Harry's own memories – like these nightly encounters are him peering into another world of a divergent version of this one, where nothing wrong has befallen Lieutenant Gore and the colors are brighter and the air not as cold as it is here. Harry isn't sure about it anymore; he realizes he's not sure he cares. What he cares about is Graham's mouth grazing his temple, his jaw, his lips, the weight of him pressing him down against his coat. Yet, the pulse have followed him here: he hears it over their breaths, the sweet rustle of clothes; it makes him go stiff in Graham's arms. He doesn't talk, not ever, this version of Lieutenant Gore – but he is still capable of looking worried and drawing him back to touch his face in silent question. 

(It soothes Harry at some level: that not even death, not even a different world, can strip a soul of its compassion.)

"I think this land wants me to hear it, dear," Harry says: he needs to call him so, to sweeten the bitterness of what he is about to add. "I think it wants us to know that, in the end, it will devour us all."

He doesn't know he thinks these things until he's said them; immediately despairs to forget them, to pluck them out of his brain. They ring true and hopeless; he cannot afford to lose hope. Daytime Harry still needs it; the men coming to him need it too. 

Gore seems to catch on his urgency: pulls him close again.  He  rests his lips against his, bleeding heat into him, sweet, liquid. Harry briefly remembers the words of the  _ Aeneid _ , the Lethe waters cleansing you of your memories; then he drinks in Graham's kiss, and lets himself be held, and when he wakes up the morning after, he remembers nothing of his dreams but that.

  
  


Lately, they are sometimes joined by Silna: the presence of her different than Graham's, less golden and less bright, but solid: a polished stone. She does nothing, and talks even less than in their daily conversations – but  in his night-visions  Harry gets to see her smile, and laugh, a deep, raspy laugh that suits her like a well-chosen jewel. Harry basks in the sight, the aesthetic pleasure of Graham Gore and Silna sitting side by side: milk and oc h re in color, but mingled together by the tenderness Harry has for them. He likes the idea of being the tie between th ese two people: of opening his arms,  unfurling , endlessly, freely, until he's  a large enough  thing to shelter them and press them both to his heart. He wants to tug them closer, both of them, leaning back in his unpleasantly narrow cot: the line of one body blending into that of the other two. Some nights, he does just that. In the freedom of dreams he cannot see anything wrong with it. He isn't sure he would find something wrong with it any way, not without real effort. 

  
  


_ Oh, dear friend, _ Harry thinks, composing his letter to Graham Gore in his head: as composing letters sound like a good way of making sense of the things that are happening, the only way available. 

Oh, dear Graham. I am not sure I have the strength to put into words wh at I have seen, and heard of; I am not sure I have the courage to make it so real. There is power in spelling out things, even on the kind of phantom paper which exists only in one's mind. It brings them to life. I am growing afraid of dormant things coming to life. 

Silna is not here, not anymore; she was chased away, and dragged back, and fled again into the night, into the dark and the cold she is the only one capable of walking through. I know she is not dead; I know she will survive most of us. All of us, maybe. I cherish the thought more than I should. 

I was there that night. I heard the screams, the angry shouting from Captain Crozier's cabin first, and then the others, from the deck sealed away from us by the ice: the shrieking growl of the white thing that took you away, Mr Blanky's sharp cries, horrible in their sparseness.

What I have not been able to experience myself, I have heard of, or can imagine. Captain Fitzjames standing tall in the captain’s cabin, sweating and always vaguely awkward when folded in the clumsiness of outer slops, baring his perfect teeth at his leader: Captain Crozier's voice growing petulant, made ugly by resentment. Mister Blanky sent out senselessly and not looking back as he climbed the ladder; the crash, the ambush, the stuck porthole. The captains spilling out at last, and Captain Crozier's face turned up as he climbed the rigging, heedless of the scorching cold, of the fact lesser men could climb it for him; his face going soft with heartbreak as they took Mister Blanky below deck, as he let him crush his hand while I sawed through the leg.

His face more unbearable to watch than the parting of muscles and bone under my blade -- the hurt of things dying. The hurt of new things being born. 

(You will forgive me if this reads too much like a Walter Scott novel: you will forgive me if some details of this make you laugh, if the characters feel gawdy with melodrama. But sometimes, I find I need good stories more acutely than I need food or sunlight.)

That was one week ago. Here, that translates in several lifetimes.  I have taken up the habit of walking out, in the grayness of these mornings: pressing my mitten s against the ice coating the parapet , just until the  feeling is shy of painful, to see if I am still warm enough to leave a  mark in it. Mister Blanky  tramps around on his brand-new wooden leg, the  cl _ ick- _ _ cl _ _ ick _ of his footsteps reminding me of the telegraph system I have read  about  – strangely comforting when you hear it echo down the  corridors of the ship. 

The men are restless. The officers are silent. The Captain has sealed himself into his cabin, made himself a prisoner of the four people he trusts the most, and sleeping through his sickness, I think. As long as you can call it sleeping – the moaning and the cursing and the gasping coming from the other side of the door, the muffled noises of bodily wars. Doctor MacDonald, unusually loose-tongued one evening, unusually ash-faced, called it 'Arctic fever'. 

Perhaps it is. In any case, I think my duty to believe it is. 

We are waiting, though we know not what for. A sign. A tragedy. A spark, blazing through the night – any spark at all. 

I realize now it hadn't even occurred to me we may still be waiting for leads. 

  
  


While the captain sleeps, Harry paces the frozen deck; composes letters in his head. He makes research, too. 

There is a suspicion which has lodged itself into his brain, throwing out roots across it: it's terrifying, and sickening, but it would explain much (the shine in the men' eye, like beetle carapaces; the darkened gums). To a scientist, there is always a grim appeal to things making sense.

The canned food; there is something wrong with the canned food. Harry lets his fingers slide down the ridged surface of the cans, the way they swell and rip out of their tops, and drops general scoops of the muck inside into Jacko's bowl, again and again. He surprises himself by finding himself mourning the little creature. Already mourning. 

By the time the poison has run its course, and there is reason for actual mourning (a thought, nonsensical to anyone but Harry Goodsir's strangely-tuned soul: a shame the monkey died after Sir John, a shame it died without the person it loved the most), Harry inspects Jacko’s purple gums and putrid viscera, and hears the low dark hum ring through him once again. 

Oh, so he was right. So this is what will happen to them; and meanwhile his companions are setting up their feast, choosing brightly-colored masks, pinning strips of paper to old clothes.

He talks to Doctor Stanley; listens with bowed head as the man blinks at his words, shrugs them away, tells him delaying the news a bit won’t hurt anyone. Harry doesn’t want to obey. He does.

(The lamp, glinting in the doctor’s eyes – like flame, open flame. Has he imagined it? Has it come before, or after what followed?)

He is so tired; he is so happy Graham Gore isn't here to suffer through this, and that glee nearly makes him lose his breakfast on the sick-bay floor. 

Harry falls asleep curled on himself, making a shrimp out of himself. He is shaking. It must be the poison coursing in his veins – spreading sickness. He tumbles into unconsciousness painting it against his eyelids: the lead and rot like black ink in his system, strangely ropy, spreading across him from the center of his chest like a monstrous dark tree. A city map, in a land without any use for one. 

  
  


For days after the fire, Harry can't dream of Graham. He lies on his cot, miserable and heavy in his still-living body, his not-burned skin smelling like burning salves, and knows tonight there will be no brushing of lips or warm bodies intertwined with his, but only the average, cottony dreams of people. He imagines it as a door, leading to that strange alternative story and now padlocked on his side. He imagines it as punishment for his silence, and a just one. 

(Still, the heart is imperfect. The heart is contrary. In a spike of angry longing, he muses Graham should be the one opening the door, considering he looks better in death than a live Harry has looked in months.)

He stumbles through his day as if floating through vapor: as if he is made of vapor himself, a man-shaped fog, tending to the agonies of the injured and explaining their future agony to the captains. Silna, the reality of her, of her being still alive even with her mouth flooded with blood, is comfort, but not the kind that makes you warm. 

He should feel more, he knows; there is resignation threading through him, and yet he fights it fiercely. He won't let heartbreak grow into routine. He won't. 

The captains tell him they are leaving: leaving the ships behind, leaving for better hopes, different hopes. Harry nods in acknowledgment; breathing through the vision of all the men who will fall and be lost on the journey. A sharpness of nausea at the idea of treading the same ground Lieutenant Gore has trodden, eroding the last marks of him from this Earth. Back to his room for the last time: palms digging into his eye sockets, until the flutters of color behind them fade into the black of sleep. 

The darkness seeps into the dream, too: but he recognizes the feeling of it, the crispness of sounds, of smells. It's night; they're out on the ice, but everything is quiet, everything is less cold than it should be. Absurdly, large buttery stars flicker across the sky, moving slowly, shot through with Northern lights.

Harry can't see the man beside him, but he instantly recognizes the chest molding to his side, the arms drawing him close; as usual, he reels from the impossible familiarity of it. 

Harry closes his eyes. He listens to the soft thump of Graham's heart. He cries then, soundlessly, painfully, knowing he won't remember any of it in the morning. 

_ So many died, dear, _ he says. Thinks.  _ So many men died; I saw them die. And all I can think is how tired I am, and how much I want to sleep _ . 

Graham says nothing: perhaps in his world there is never any need for spoken words. He presses his lips to Harry's ear, though, in the way he has discovered he likes the most. 

Harry cried harder. He curls his fingers around the buttons of Graham's coats, clinging to them like a child. 

_I think I can endure dying, Graham. But I cannot die a cruel man._

  
  


Easter morning: a last glimpse of the  _ Erebus  _ and the  _ Terro _ r against the pale sun, glinting prettily with their ice lace. Harry mutters prayers with the others, and more than th ose strictly necessary, thinking of sacrifice and rebirth.  Of  Lieutenant Gore's broken body swinging from the monster's jaws, like a dead rabbit, a dead lamb. 

  
  


The march quickly proves excruciating. Nothing here wants them to stay alive. Harry does his best not to shudder at the gray expanse of it, the rhythmic hum in his veins, cruelly healthier than the starved flutter of his own heart. When he lies down in the evening, he almost feels the ground shift with muscles under his head, the unlocking of enormous maws ready to swallow them up. 

They lose s o many of them . They lose so much. He doesn't want to pick  from the lot, to choose those he feels  the greater grief for, but he does. Mister Collins, who has probably seen and understood more than anyone else, and who believes himself mad because of it; poor Murfin,  ravaged by the exact measure of Harry's helplessness; Henry Peglar, now riding often in the boats beside his lover – oh, yes, lover; what the  hurt in saying that word now, in le tting  them  have  the relief of dying  with the name they chose for each other – too weak even to be afraid. He picks favorites, against his own will, people he will be genuinely miserable about not being able to share a talk or a laugh with anymore;  p eople who have his permission to chip away at his soul with their pain. 

They're still moving. Harry's provisions dwindle day by day and are still too heavy. The land uncurls before them: endless, roadless, foodless. Harry feels himself forget how it feels not to be this hungry, talks with Graham under his breath – about their first expedition, about the turkey they had on their first on-ship Christmas; about the sweets his parents' cook used to make around Christmas and leave a private batch for him, the fat delight of them, like stuffing your mouth with sunlight. It does sound like he's saying goodbye to all those things.

Ahead of them,  at the front  of the sad black line of the men and the boats, the captains: side by side, always. ( _ Not for long _ , adds Harry; he hates himself a bit for the thought.) Captain Crozier leading the way, whittled down by his malady to something tender and exhausted and impossible to stop. Captain Fitzjames staggering from step to step, wheezing as the motion  rattles through his oozing wounds and stiff bones,  the whole of him  made into a flute of hurting. In the lapses between one conversation with Graham and the next, Harry looks upon them as they try exchanging jokes; as Fitzjames’s yellowed face still smiles every time he manages to make Captain Crozier laugh. Feels himself drown in the desperate light surrounding them. 

(They are, too, among those he picked: the chosen ones whose grief is allowed to break him a bit further. Both are.)

  
  


In his tent, Harry cries: he cries for Murfin, and for his pain, and, briefly, for himself too. He's scared of the numbness that has woven back into him; of how mechanical this crying feels like, how much like steam escaping from sealed joints.

He used to be soft; he used to be warm. What is he, now? In the end, the end that he knows will come, how little will it remain of him? 

He has his eyes closed as he hears her rustle into the tent; keeps them  shut  as she shuffles towards him, as she folds down at his side and pulls him against her body – as hard as  h is, but  hers hard with strength, with healt h. He sees the shape of her on the inside of his eyelids, of him, as precisely as a woodcut rendition. 

He scrambles around his memories, through the haze of hunger, to see if he's ever learned the right words her people would use to express what is happening inside him:  _ oh the fear, the loss, the loss of myself.  _ He can't find them. He wonders if he would use them even if he had them. 

There is no more action, throughout the night or the portion of it Harry spends awake; no further shift of bodies, rubbing of skin. But he does feel her calm breath in his hair; the exquisite fitting of his spine between the swell of her breasts. It's enough. It's more than he has ever had the privilege to have. 

Harry Goodsir dreams that night: he dreams of the other world, the one so like their own, and of sleeping against Graham's smiling lips, Silna sinewy arms encircling both of them, keeping him safe, safe, safe. 

In this darkness, in this despair, such dreams feel peculiarly like rebellion. 

  
  


Oh, my dear Graham – look at them: the ones left behind and the ones cluttered around me, dragging me forward, cawing and screaming and scouring for scraps like a flock of panicked ravens. A murder. How disquieting a name for a group of birds, and yet so fitting -- because Mister Hickey's hands seem to be coated with it, the promise of violence, of blood spilled uglily.

His companions are drained, haggard bag of bones, much like me: not him. Mister Hickey strolls before the sad lumpy band of us like a general, like a carefree shepherd boy, jangling with excitement. He looks pinker in the cheek too; bright-eyed. Feeding on the life of others, of his partners in crime, of me. 

Never did I loathe human happiness so much. 

  
  


They get the captain, and that hits Harry square in the chest: shocking him that some things should still hurt him so. Crozier is tattered, the clothes and the person underneath, and hurt, and looking ten years older than the last time Harry saw him; he is still burning more vividly than any of the ghosts haunting the mutineers’ camp. He is also suspiciously alone, and that brings to Harry's mind images of a tall body dying piece by piece, the bottle of poison he has left with Bridgens as extra precaution. His suspicions are to prove sadly true. 

They ask him to take care of their captive, of the scratches splitting open most of his face; Harry obeys. He quivers at the privilege of being tasked with something that doesn't flood his stomach with nausea. As he cleans his wounds, they talk: Harry learning of all that happened after he was taken, the cruelty of Hickey's last trick to lure the captain away. Halfway through the story, he has to bite down on his tongue not to forbid Crozier from talking of more death and ache, and not to ask him instead to be quiet and curl up with him on the cot and sleep, just sleep.

But they shouldn't stop; Harry needs all the data, all the possible corners of this story. There is a plan germinating in the back of his head, and he wants it to work. He wants it to mean something. But first –

Harry takes Jones's ring out of his pocket; presses it into Crozier's hand. The dead deserve kindness, too. 

"Would you do this for me, please?" 

"Of course I will."

Captain Crozier nods, solemnly. Across his bruised face, like a room suddenly thrown into sunlight, briefly: a desperate light, the same of the days he spent joking with a dying Fitzjames. 

Harry smiles. "Thank you, Captain." 

"There is no need to thank me." Captain Crozier shakes his head. "Nor any need to give me this ring. You can bring it to the lady yourself, once back in London."

Harry blinks. Slowly. "Back in London?" 

"Of course. I'm taking you with me: I will not leave this place without you, doctor."

Another blink. He can't mean it, he cannot possibly mean it. And yet – yes, of course he does. He does intend to bring Harry back. He is Francis Crozier, who was not much to most of them by the beginning of this journey, who has become almost everything by the end. He is the purified version of that man. It occurs to Harry how much he  has lost in the past few days, according to what he himself  just told him: his best friend,  Blanky,  and Captain Fitzjames, who was – something other. More. Different. A piece of heart, from the way Crozier can barely pluck the  tale of his death  out of himself. And his ship too, earlier on, and other friends, and his men, shepherded for weeks like children and falling dead one by one, an agony of fatherhood. 

Yet, this man is still standing; he is still planning  plans, and talking of hope, and knowing exactly where they are and where they should go. As he receives the full attention of Crozier's blue eyes, Harry doesn't feel comforted (he's too far gone for that), but more in balance: as if his captain has brought gravity  with himself . 

The thought, ambushing Harry with a knife to the heart:  _ if there  _ _ had ever been  _ _ the slightest hope of  _ _ success _ _ , he would have been the man who could have lead them to it _ . A pulse of regret, at not being strong enough to stay longer, and see him try. 

And yet – they can have this. They still can have this: the sunlight slanting through the flaps, the quiet of this moment, this trust. This moment, at last, to unburden himself, to be seen.

"Sir," Harry says, "what would you say if I told you I – I knew this would come to be? That I did not know perhaps the how, but  _ felt _ we were not to be here? That there are creatures inhabiting this place, or  that this place itself  is  something of a creature, and that it is hungry, and that it swore to crush us from the very day Lieutenant – Lieutenant Gore  put  that cylinder in the cairn, if not from  the very day she set out to conquer this place ?" The slightest sha ke around Graham's voice, like a spasm. "What if I tell you I heard its heart beating, the  pulse of the creature, of its hate? What if I tell you I hear it laugh at our hope, every night?" 

Captain Crozier goes very still under his hands. Harry can suddenly feel the stiffening of muscles, the pulse in his neck thrumming harder. For a moment, he wonders if telling him was a mistake: but no, no. The emotion on the captain's face is complicated, but it's not reproach. More like dawning revaluation. A private kind of pity. 

"I hoped I was the only one plagued with this kind of fanciful impressions," he says at last; Harry nearly startled into laughing, because these  thoughts may be many things, but not  _ fanciful.  _

"Does it mean…?" 

"I'm Irish, Doctor Goodsir. My grandmother saw spirits dance on her windowsill every All Hallows’ Eve. It's high time I acknowledge it. Certain side effects come with the condition." He licks his lips. "But you, Harry. I – I didn't realize. I wouldn't have imagined you felt it, too. I am what I am, but you…" Crozier lifts his eyes into his again. "I thought you were a man of faith."

For some reason, Harry doubts Crozier is referring to the Church faith – the one confident all matters of conscience can be resolved via well-dusted pulpits and Sunday sermons and a vaguely frowning God in the background. He feels confident he's talking of faith in the world, in the goodness of it. In the goodness of men. 

"I am," he says. "I still am. I have faith, even in this place. Even as it devours us one by one, I still see beauty in it."

Crozier doesn’t let him look away for another long moment. He seems to be on the verge of adding something: of touching Harry's arm, his shoulder. Harry is quietly grateful when he doesn't. He cannot be sure he wouldn't have fallen apart if he had. 

"Now, I need you to listen to me, Captain. Before they come back."

Harry explains everything to the captain; Crozier refuses, buckles under the very concept of it. It is expected. It is all right. No matter how much he hates them, he will still remember the rules, a well-ordered mind with a life-long training in following absurd orders.

_Eat nothing but the sole of my feet. Make a show of it. No other part, sir. I'm begging you to remember._

Hickey saunters into the tent a couple of minutes later: swaggering in his good fortune, in the prized prey he got himself. He looks at Captain Crozier with a dark glee that reminds Harry of the way his father and his brothers look at a lusciously-golden pheasant shot out of the sky or a buck slung over the gamekeeper's shoulders. Harry feels the urge to put himself between him and that gaze. The captain beats him to it; shoots to his feet, stepping before him. Hickey is talking to him, Crozier replying through gritted teeth; Harry doesn't bother listening. There is no part for his character in this scene. 

Shortly after Harry is watching his captain walk out in the cold, and feels ambushed by a spike of affection. He is to find him in the morning. He is to be heartbroken over him. He is to survive. 

  
  


Harry prepares himself with care, but not without trepidation. Hands shaking subtly around the bottle stopper; sobs trying to break out of him, erratically. He trembles at the smell he's painting himself with, rubbing into himself, pungent and sickly at the same time. He feels young, obscenely so, like a child pulled into a game he's stopped enjoying; he feels older than he's ever going to be. The poison is bitter as it goes down his throat.

When he's done, he sits on the cot. Pulls back his sleeves. He applies the scalpel blade to his wrist, and presses down on the web of purple veins, coming into relief with starvation, just slightly. A starting point. A map, in a mapless land. 

Methodically, without resentment, he starts ticking off the regrets of his life. No wife, no bells pealing above the roses-strung, dragging awkwardness of Scottish weddings. No son or daughter to teach his letters to. He will never see his family again, his raucous band of brothers and sisters, all petite and curious and bushy-haired, his mother's soft hands caressing the piano. He will never tell them of the wonders he has seen, and the horrors; he will never look in their eyes and know if what came back from the Arctic can still be called Harry Goodsir. Never will he publish his dictionary; never will he tell about it to Silna, not chastened in the constricting cotton of European women but fierce in her pelts, full of love for the language she cannot speak anymore; never will he tell about it to Graham Gore. Graham. 

No, no; that is not quite true. Graham will not figure among his regrets: the memory of his lips and the weight of him as true as the one of his body dangling from a monster's jaws. They have met, somehow; struck a cord so deep within each other it kept vibrating even past death. He has watched impossible things unfolding, most of them terrible; he will retain the right to believe wonder can be tender, too.

Somehow, as he closes his eyes and leans back against the cot, somehow he thinks he sees the sense in this arrangement of things: a wisdom in the place this story brought each of them, Captain Crozier, Silna, Graham, him. He's always been aware of the difference between them, of the fact that he was much more like the pale softness of the Lieutenant Gore of his dreams than she is. She was bound to survive both of them, in life, in this life. Now it is time for Harry to take his place: to make this last service to the living. 

If he has never been able to bring himself to handle a weapon, he can at least make one out of himself. 

He cuts into the skin. Nearly passes out at the shock of it; keeps going. He's struck by the knowledge of what will become of his body, strips of him disappearing into human mouths, munched over like mutton stew , bringing sickness and death with it. Even in the agony of his arms, he buckles under the thought. It should not be true. It is  _ not  _ true. There must still be beauty, even here, even now: or they are all damned, the whole world of humanity is, and despite all its anger and vileness, he knows it is not. 

So, he recalls the light – Silna's arms around his waist; the silhouette of Crozier and Fitzjames blending together against the glare of the sun; Jones's ring, not lost after all, not lost. As the blade  moves up his arms and the pain grows, Harry Goodsir calls upon the light until he's blinded by it. 

Blood is flowing; the pain throbbing away, dark encroaching in the space left empty by it. These last minutes, though, are not for the light. They are for him, him alone. So he summons Graham, the alternative version he has learned to know (be known by) better, and he comes: and Harry opens eyes to a world completely different. Gone is the agony, the gore of his split-open arms: he is whole, and warm, and reaching out. Graham meets him halfway, smiles against his lips. His almost lover, his murdered lamb: his moment of respite, through so many of these hopeless nights. A blaze of gratitude, a haze of it. Relief. Sigh. Kiss. 

(In the end, his cabinet of curiosities: _I lived, I lived, I lived._ )

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
